The Art of Herding Sheep

In my last post, I wrote about vanishing know how around food.  For the past couple of years I have been learning one vanishing art that few choose to undertake: sheep herding.  Yes, you read correctly.  Sheep herding.  Now how did I get into that, you ask?  It’s a long story…

Just shy of 20 years ago, I brought home a little bundle of black, brown and white fur from a sheep farm.  I named him Jake and he became my best friend and constant companion for nearly 14 years.  Jake was a border collie, a natural born sheep herding machine.  Unfortunately for both of us, I never had a chance to take him to sheep.  Jake spent his years herding cats and cars and anything else that moved.  We had a good life together, but I promised myself that my next border collie would get to work sheep.

A little over two years ago, I brought home another little bundle of black, white and butterscotch fur.  This one I named Hannah.  She had floppy ears and one blue eye, and looked like a pot bellied pig crossed with a Jack Russell Terrier.  It was hard to imagine that she would grow into the striking and brilliant dog that she is today:

  

Like Jake, Hannah was bred specifically for working sheep.  While this may seem quaint, I recently had to manage a sheep farm for 10 days and let me tell you, you cannot care for stock without a good stock dog.  At least not naturally reared stock that is out on pasture.  I could have gone out to the field with a pail of grain and lured in the sheep, but trying to get them to go specifically where I wanted would have been impossible without Hannah’s help.  Especially the little lambs, who were constantly escaping and running willy nilly in fields they were supposed to be kept out of (lamb photos to come shortly!).  If you’ve never seen a dog work sheep before, here’s a nice little summary video I came across that is only 3 minutes long.

Hannah and I have been training to herd sheep for about 18 months.  Prior to that I spent another roughly 18 months learning about sheep.  After three years, I finally knew enough to babysit the farm for 10 days, and that’s not saying very much!  There is just so much to know, and it’s not something that comes instinctively.  At least it didn’t to me.  Despite my passion for animals and my many pets, stock are a whole other ball game.  The learning curve to dealing with them has been (and continues to be) very steep!

This weekend I had a big boost to my confidence.  Hannah and I entered our first sheepdog trial, held in central Michigan, and we won first prize in both classes we entered, and the overall novice championship for the weekend.  This is a really, really big deal for me.  I’d been wanting to learn how to herd for nearly 20 years.  Once I finally started training, I discovered how incredibly difficult it is.  Very few people stick it out even to the novice level that I am at now, which took me 3 years to attain.  To get to the top levels takes many more years.  

This kind of knowledge used to get passed on generationally.  Kids would learn how to manage stock, and how to train up their stock dog, from helping their parents.  This is no longer the case as most kids start school by age 2, and few parents still farm.  Fewer still farm traditionally.  Knowing how to raise animals naturally, without industrial means, takes a tremendous amount of know how and our pool of that knowledge is now a barely damp imprint of where a puddle used to be.  We really need to do something about this, and do it soon.  The current push for local food is all fine and dandy, but we really should be pushing for non-industrial food.  It is going to take us years to transition to this kind of farming, and I’m not sure we have the luxury of that much time.  If we get there, we are going to need some good stock dogs.  While I still may be struggling with how to cook, when it comes to having a good stock dog I, for one, will be ready!

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